A History of the Extreme Porn Act in Scotland

This page is under construction, and many links are out of date. (Many were taken from an email from last year and were working at the time.) A full listing of the links and documents relating to the bill can be found here.

A History of the Extreme Pornography in the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act (2010)

Pornography has been under attack in Scotland for many years. CAAN-Scotland completed a Freedom of Information Request to uncover the extent of support and evidence for the extreme pornography legislation which highlighted PE476 back in 2002-3 before Liz Longhurst was tragically murdered. (See Correspondence 13.)

PE476 was done by the group Scottish Women Against Pornography, and the petition is currently listed as having 2 – yes, TWO – signatures.

SWAP wouldn’t let it lie, and after a flurry of letters in 2003 (See Correspondence 11 & Correspondence 14), opened up PE752 in 2004 “calling for the Scottish Parliament to enact legislation to define pornographic material as incitement to sexual hatred and to make such incitement an offence similar to that of incitement to racial hatred.” This petition was less successful than the previous one, gathering only one signature. Yet it still resulted in the Equal Opportunities Committee questioning the Scottish Executive on the “harmfulness of pornography”. Meetings regarding this carried over into early 2005.

Up until this point, SWAP has been persistent, but also consistent. They are against all pornography, but especially the “pornography” (i.e. lads mags) that is visible to them. If the world was run by SWAP, there would be no “extreme” pornography law, there would just be a pornography law. So somewhere between SWAP’s petitions, a change occurred in the Scottish Executive, which decided that violent pornography was the problem. To continue following SWAP’s crusade against scantily clad women, please go to LADS MAGS (PE1169) page.

The consultation closed near the end of 2005. 68 Responses to the consultation are available on the Scottish Government Website where the respondent agreed to their response being made public. The then-Scottish Executive published an analysis of the responses to that consultation in January 2006.

The consultation, which was referred to several times throughout the extreme pornography law debate, is well worth the read, if only for the list of contributors. What pornography has to do with children (e.g. Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration) is beyond me. Remember, this single document, with all its flaws, is pretty much the only research the Scottish Government relied on in the creation of the law.

The proposal lay dormant for some time. Westminster, as you may gather, was equally busy at this time. After some naïve hope that the extreme pornography ban would not affect Scotland, the Scottish Executive announced the legislation on 11 Sept 2008 in the Revitalising Justice: Proposals to Modernise and Improve Criminal Justice. This announcement sent more ripples out. Between the announcement in Sept 2008 and the introduction of the bill into Parliament, there were 15 different emails or letters to MSPs or the Scottish Executive relating to the bill. You can see the snowball effect this law was having.

Patrick Down said in response to CAAN-Scotlands question regarding evidence supporting the Extreme Pornography legislation:

The Standing Orders of the Parliament require that a Bill introduced by the Executive must be accompanied by a Policy Memorandum setting out:

(i) the policy objectives of the Bill;

(ii) whether alternative ways of meeting those objectives were considered and, if so, why the approach taken in the Bill was adopted;

(iii) the consultation, if any, which was undertaken on those objectives and the ways of meeting them or on the detail of the Bill and a summary of the outcome of that consultation; and

(iv) an assessment of the effects, if any, of the Bill on equal opportunities, human rights, island communities, local government, sustainable development and any other matter which the Scottish Ministers consider relevant.

Basically, the Policy Memorandum is the Scottish Government’s equivalent of a summary of evidence. (See pages 24-27 for the EP bit.)

The Justice Committee also put out a call for evidence on the Bill. “Evidence” is a loose term, that runs the full gamut between in-depthresearched summaries of a topic to personal anecdotes to one-page“I agree with so-and-so” statements. The fact of the matter is that it all counts. They don’t take misspellings into consideration, nor do they allow count the number of references a letter has. All they consider is whether it is the truth to the writer, and making sure there’s no slander. Even if one group writes an in-depth piece and 20 other people write in saying “I agree”, they still count 21 responses.

Responses to the Justice Committee’s call for evidence are published on the Scottish Parliament website, for both Stage 1 (all topics, including Extreme Pornography) and Stage 2 (the Prostitution and Lap Dancing amendments)

The Justice Committee also took oral evidence on the Bill at Stage 1. The provisions on extreme pornography were discussed in evidence sessions on 26 May 2009, 2 June 2009, and 9 June 2009.